Battle of the Notepads
Posted: Friday, October 02, 2009
by Mark Bartley
It's easy to fall head of heels with technology. Who doesn't love their laptop, the iPhone (you kno
Well maybe... but probably not. Whilst undoubtedly there are great potential benefits to living in the Matrix and being able to check email remotely, Blackberry sales figures to the office from abroad or pretend to down a Guinness on your IPhone, technology most certainly isn't the be all and end all of commercial success. There are plenty of healthy, wealthy and wise entrepreneurs that deliberately sidestep the technological options on occasions - not because they object to technology, distrust it or have adopted some kind of Luddite position on silicon. No, there are plenty of business leaders who as well as appreciating the huge benefits that technology can offer are wise enough to know that everything has its place and that there are some instances when old skool works best.
It's something to do with mental pollution, with the clumsy getting in the way that happens when you need to think too hard about your thoughts. When there is friction, interference, distortion imposed on an idea through the way it is recorded the idea itself suffers.
Disintermediation is the key and what better way of transferring and recording pure ideas than straight in to a notebook. No booting, no turning on, no waiting, no unnecessary decision making, no loss, limited process, limited scope for error, lots of room for embellishment, addition, augmentation all on your terms in a code and language that you are intimately familiar with. Think record. It's that simple with a notebook.
Beethoven always carried a notebook around with him so that he could write down musical ideas on the go. Einstein always carried a notebook with him to jot down ideas when taking his child for a walk. OK - so neither had the option to use or compare an electronic equivalent but if a notebook's good enough for two of the greatest minds in history then there must be something going on.
More recently Aristotle Onassis insisted on always carrying a notebook to jot down ideas. 'A million dollar lesson they don't teach you in business school', he said. Richard Branson is also a notebook fiend collecting well over 100 black ledger notebooks used to record ideas, some of which have made him wealthy.
Even Matt Cutts of Google gets in on the act. Despite his unmatched IT credentials he's a big fan of the notebook saying, 'You never know when your brain is going to flash on an idea, a great gift, or something you need from the store. That's why I carry a small notebook around with me most of the time.
Who's to argue with great minds like these, minds that over the years have applied themselves to the development of technology, some of which is starting to approach the power, flexibility and pure effectiveness of the simple but technologically-unsurpassed notebook.
Owning and using a simple notepad seems to suit many people despite technology marching ever onwards. Read the reviews of Mark Bartley for current thoughts and opinions on modern office environments.
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